With the interest in legislating truth in political advertising, it might be pertinent to link to this Parliament of Queensland committee report from 1996 discussing the matter.
One key point from the report is that any attempt to legislate truth in political advertising must define what constitutes untruth sufficient to warrant action. Most such attempts at legislation in the past have attempted to restrict advertisements that are both factually inaccurate and are therefore deceiving. For instance, consider this rejected clause in federal electoral amendments from 1994:
A person must not, during the relevant period in relation to an election under this Act, authorise the printing, publishing or distribution of any electoral advertisement containing a statement:
(a) that is untrue; and
(b) that is, or is likely to be, misleading or deceptive.
This is a considerably weaker protection than Section 52 of the Trade Practices Act (as it existed at the time of the committee report) regulating commercial advertising, which stated:
A corporation shall not, in trade or commerce, engage in conduct that is misleading or deceptive or is likely to mislead or deceive.
The trouble is that requiring a statement to be both “false and misleading” wouldn’t have stopped a thing. If being misleading is enough to get you in trouble, it seems to me that we’re in for endless litigation of election advertising in the courts. Consider the following two negative advertisements from the 2010 campaign:
Both ads are sufficiently vague that it’s very hard to pin anything in them with the tag of outright falsehood. But are they misleading? Particularly in the Liberal case, I’d say there’s a strong case that they are; in the case of the Labor ad, the claim that Abbott would “bring back WorkChoices” might well be. But in each case, you could mount a defence that could muddy the waters considerably. For instance, can Labor claim to “control” how many boats head for Australian waters?
And do you really want some judicial or quasi-judicial body trying to sort this out in the middle of an election campaign?
Nice post.
Truth in political adverstising is something that might sound good in theory, in practice is almost unworkable.
I don’t think they would have adequate time to properly judge the adverts – especially when it comes to potentially misleading ones rather than blatantly claiming something is untrue. And after the election, there’s really not much you can do about it. Its up to the voters to remember for the next election…..
Perhaps lengthening the media advertising blackout time would help – so people would have time to respond to blatant lies through through news programs, on their websites etc…
There’s also the issue of defining what counts as political advertising – if a party sends out a press release or video segment that is then published unaltered, are they liable? Or does the non-payment of the publisher mean it’s no longer advertising?
Typical of them, trying to dislocate or reduce issues of policy to an abstraction of aesthetics.
Nothing has really changed since Barthes.
That the system should have reached the moral bankruptcy of valorisation of the lie rather than face up to the contradictions this raises, or the social debit that comes from an uninformed polity.
All political advertising during elections is misleading, tawdry and an insult to our intelligence and anyone who believes such drivel should be forced to exchange their IQ with their pets.
Rather than focus on limiting what parties can do, I’d prefer reform focus on more positive measures, such as public funding with strings attached. For example the publicly funded part of the campaign could only focus on the candidate, party and policies publishing the material, and that any policies involving public spending be costed by treasury (or other suitable body), etc.
Most of these truth in advertising rules have their origin in regulations Billy Hughes introduced during World War 1, under the War Precautions Act, with the intention of monstering the No case during the Conscription referendums. (War Precautions (Military Service Referendum) Regulations). There is a reference to them in L F Fitzhardinge’s biography of Hughes.
Truth in advertising – the Greens would have to scrap just about every campaign they run.
Truth in political advertising was inserted into the Commonwealth Electoral Act in (I think) 1983, but it was removed again before the next election, so it was never tested. The amendments were put forward by the Australian Democrats.
The Electoral Commission has always opposed being involved with making any judgments on this, as it would involve in something which would invariably by some people as partisan.
The Australian Democrats pushed truth in political advertising very strongly for many years. In part this was driven by reaction to losing a court case following the 1980 election (Evans vs Crichton-Browne), where they tried to use the existing Electoral Act clause about misleading voters in relation to advertisements and electoral material distributed by Crichton-Browne which stated that a vote for the Democrats was a vote for Labor (or words to that effect). Whilst this was obviously false, the Court interpreted the Electoral Act clause narrowly, and I think correctly, to only apply to misleading information about the actual casting of their vote (i.e. how to fill in their ballot paper), rather than information aimed at influencing who they would vote for.
There is also a respectable argument that legislating to regulate the “truth” of statements made by campaigning political candidates (is that absolute or relative truth your honour?) is fundamentally undemocratic.
The people should be allowed to judge the “truth” of pollywaffle (my budget is more honest that hers, honestly) at the ballot box.
After all, we have a talented and socially responsible Press Gallery quite capable of investigating and accurately reporting any remaining factual porkies, don’t we?